[Internal]: Add Elastic Defend Specific Supported Operating Systems Page to Documentation

[jamiehynds]

Description

One of the most common questions we get from endpoint security customers and prospects is:
“Do you support the operating systems in my environment?”

Currently, the only way to answer this is by directing users to the Elastic support matrix. While comprehensive, this matrix covers all Elastic components and includes a historical view of supported operating systems, making it difficult for users to quickly find what’s currently supported for Elastic Defend specifically.

Proposal:
Add a dedicated page to the Elastic Defend documentation that clearly lists the currently supported operating systems — for example:

• Windows Server 2019
• Windows 11
• macOS 15

This will improve the user experience by making this essential information available within the Defend docs, reducing the need for users to leave the documentation or parse through the broader support matrix.

Notes:

The existing support matrix will continue to be maintained for comprehensive coverage.

This page should be easy to locate within the Defend docs and kept current as new OS versions are supported and end of life OS are removed.

Benefits:
✅ Faster access to relevant information for Defend users
✅ Reduced reliance on external resources
✅ Cleaner, more contextual documentation experience

Resources

n/a

Which documentation set does this change impact?

Elastic On-Prem and Cloud (all)

Feature differences

n/a

What release is this request related to?

N/A

Serverless release

n/a

Collaboration model

The documentation team

Point of contact.

Main contact: @roxana-gheorghe

Stakeholders: @jamiehynds

[natasha-moore-elastic]

Hi @jamiehynds – thanks for opening the issue. I’ve checked with the wider Docs team, and found out that we've actually been moving in the opposite direction across the docs, for example in ECE and Elasticsearch docs we’ve recently replaced in-docs support tables with links to the support matrix. We've found that those tables tend to get out of sync really easily, and unfortunately we don’t have the bandwidth to take on that kind of maintenance. The support matrix is the source of truth, and keeping duplicate info aligned would be a challenge.

Our suggestion would be to add a link from the Defend requirements page directly to the Elastic Defend section of the support matrix. That way users can still get to the info they need more easily, without introducing duplicate content we’d need to keep updated.

[jamiehynds]

Hey @natasha-moore-elastic - the challenge we hear from endpoint customers with the support matrix is the fact it contains so much information, spanning so many releases, it's not immediately transparent as to what we actually support.

PM is happy to commit to ownership of a supported OS page within the Defend docs. The content will be pretty static as adding or removing support for new OS typically isn't a regular occurrence, so we don't envisage a significant overhead.

Do you think we could make this work if PM commits to ensuring the page remains up to date? It would consist of a bullet pointed list of 20 or so operating systems.

[florent-leborgne]

Hi @jamiehynds, we appreciate the will to commit on this, but I would still advise against doing it for several reasons:

• First, maintaining multiple sources of truth is a door open to errors. Unfortunately this is something we have experienced multiple times with our docs, with differences starting to show between various tables after a few releases (and in most cases it's the docs that become outdated, while the support matrix is usually correctly updated in due time).
• Another thing to consider here is that since 9.0, our documentation is no longer duplicated for each minor release. Instead, all of 9+ changes must be reflected on the same page using tagging ("added in 9.1", "removed in 9.3", etc.). So this list would grow and become heavily annotated over time, instead of staying up to date with just the "latest" items supported, which is I think what you're suggesting here.

Mainly for these reasons, we want to stay consistent with how we treat this case in our docs moving forward.

The support matrix update process is well anchored. I certainly agree that it's not the most pleasant or easiest page to read. My suggestion would rather be to:

• In the docs, add a link that goes straight to the correct table in the support matrix (https://www.elastic.co/support/matrix#elastic-defend)
• Instead of duplicating information, find ways to optimize that table. For example:
  • Split the table to have 1 per "major" and thus less columns in each (and we can link to the right one from the docs as well).
  • Change the ordering of rows to display the latest versions first.
  • Make a request to the Web team to improve the table with the ability to freeze the heading row.
  • Make a request to the Web team to improve these tables with filtering (this is something we may have in our docs in the future too, but not yet).